The Baron in his indifference--for his wife was to
have, and in fact had, forty thousand francs a year--left the
management of les Rouxey to a sort of factotum, an old servant of the
Wattevilles named Modinier. Nevertheless, whenever the Baron and his
wife wished to go out of the town, they went to les Rouxey, which is
very picturesquely situated. The chateau and the park were, in fact,
created by the famous Watteville, who in his active old age was
passionately attached to this magnificent spot.
Between two precipitous hills--little peaks with bare summits known as
the great and the little Rouxey--in the heart of a ravine where the
torrents from the heights, with the Dent de Vilard at their head, come
tumbling to join the lovely upper waters of the Doubs, Watteville had
a huge dam constructed, leaving two cuttings for the overflow. Above
this dam he made a beautiful lake, and below it two cascades; and
these, uniting a few yards below the falls, formed a lovely little
river to irrigate the barren, uncultivated valley, and these two hills
he enclosed in a ring fence, and built himself a retreat on the dam,
which he widened to two acres by accumulating above it all the soil
which had to be removed to make a channel for the river and the
irrigation canals.
When the Baron de Watteville thus obtained the lake above his dam he
was owner of the two hills, but not of the upper valley thus flooded,
through which there had been at all times a right-of-way to where it
ends in a horseshoe under the Dent de Vilard.
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